Hydrogen Gruppendenken Tripping Up Germany Research & Policy
German Energy Agency is one of many serious organizations putting out deeply flawed reports and studies
In recent months it’s become clear that there’s a distinctly non-cottage industry in Germany producing unintentionally and intentionally misleading reports about hydrogen for energy. Today yet another significant and respected organization crossed my screen, dena, or the German Energy Agency. (Lower-case is their branding and it’s an acronym of a German language name.)
It’s a think tank that was set up by governmental and industry actors in 2000 to be a competence center for applied energy transition and climate protection. Its governance body is mostly governmental representatives. It has about 550 employees per its website and 460 per LinkedIn. German academics and governmental types in general frequently don’t consider LinkedIn a platform to be engaged with or represented on, it seems.
Some red flags start to appear fairly quickly, at least a far as hydrogen for energy is concerned. The first, of course, is that it’s the German Energy Agency. By definition it views the molecule through the distorted lens of energy, not through its true role as an industrial feedstock. Confusion ensues.
